Blizzard Baja

Design hits the dirt (and snow)

It’s ten o’clock in the morning under a gray February sky, and forty-eight baja cars
are roaring southward on Third Street, toward the Lake Linden village campground.
It’s the start of the twelfth running of the Winter Baja, hosted by Michigan Tech’s
Blizzard Baja Enterprise.

These are baja cars as the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) defines them: “off-road
vehicles that will survive the severe punishment of rough terrain.” Here in Lake Linden,
about ten miles northeast of Michigan Tech, rough terrain takes the form of ice-slicked
turns and jumps built from snow. Winter Baja is a frozen dress rehearsal for SAE’s
international baja competitions.

Blizzard Baja team members helped Lake Linden’s Department of Public Works design
and build this course, which winds a circuitous route through the village’s park and
campground. Students and locals alike are out to watch baja cars catch air on the
snow jumps and rub tires around the turns.

In the field are three generations of Tech’s baja cars: No. 73 (the oldest, nicknamed
Red Car), No. 43 (East Car), and No. 50 (Widow). These cars from Tech’s previous campaigns
represent evolutionary steps toward Daytona, the car Blizzard Baja is building for
the official 2012 Baja SAE races.

Part of the SAE’s Collegiate Design Series, the Baja SAE competition simulates the
process of developing a vehicle for factory production. It gives students a chance
to apply their classroom skills to a real-world project. Thirty Blizzard Baja team
members are working on Daytona. Most are mechanical engineering majors, but business
and mechanical engineering technology are also represented.

In the machine shop on the ground floor of Tech’s Minerals and Materials Engineering
Building, mechanical engineering senior Scott Rhudy explained some of the finer points
of Daytona’s drivetrain. As Blizzard Baja’s drivetrain team leader, Rhudy designed
Daytona’s shining aluminum gearbox and oversaw development of the clutch and other
components.

“It was pretty much a clean slate,” he said. “We did a lot of work to determine the
bearing loads and the gear tooth loads. And that determined the size of the box.”

The new gearbox is compact and lighter than its predecessor. It arrived at Tech as
a solid block of aluminum; all the machining, with the exception of cutting the gear
teeth, was done by Tech students. This brings up a point about Tech’s baja cars: they
are pretty much built from scratch. Off-the-shelf parts include tires, shock absorbers,
and not a lot else.

During Winter Baja’s morning session, the course eats up the cars. Thirteen are in
the pits, including Tech’s No. 73; mechanical engineering senior Kyle Broetzmann is
working furiously on the carburetor. From time to time, additional vehicles are towed
in. One has mangled its rear suspension on some harsh jumps near the village baseball
field. On those same jumps, the Virginia Tech car shatters its right front wheel.

Considerations of repairability inspired Tech’s design, including a modular front
end for Daytona’s tube-steel frame that can be replaced during a relatively short
pit stop.

“The front end of our car can take a lot of abuse, and in the past we’ve actually
bashed in tubes that we’ve had to cut and re-weld,” team president Bret Schulte said.
“During a race, we do not have that kind of time.”

Midway through the afternoon endurance race, 73 is running smoothly. Broetzmann has
spent the last two hours disassembling, cleaning, and rebuilding its carburetor at
least a dozen times, his dedication to the task born from the fact the engine problems
were cutting into teammates’ time behind the wheel.

“You got guys who worked all season long on all the cars, including the new one, and
they deserve to get their time in driving just as much as I do,” he says.

Because the chance to drive the cars at speed is one of the rewards of the Blizzard
Baja Enterprise. One major reason Tech hosts Winter Baja is to give all the schools’
team members a few golden minutes in the drivers’ seats of cars they spend countless
hours designing and building.

The other is to put designs through real-world paces in advance of the SAE’s official
race series.

“We got our testing done,” mechanical engineering junior Nathan Koetsier says after
the race. “We know what went wrong and what didn’t go wrong, so we can apply that
knowledge to the new car.”

Epilogue

Blizzard Baja finished the 2012 Winter Baja seventh in a field of sixteen. Later in
the year, Daytona saw warm-weather action at the SAE Baja international competition
in Wisconsin, where the team placed eighth among the ninety-five entries.

Michigan Technological University is a public research university, home to more than
7,000 students from 54 countries. Founded in 1885, the University offers more than
120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering,
forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, and
social sciences. Our campus in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula overlooks the Keweenaw Waterway
and is just a few miles from Lake Superior.